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Mutants Trevor Knew
These students at Whateley Academy knew Ayla back before he manifested, back when he was Trevor. Some friends, some enemies, some casual acquaintances. Some family. Friends Jadis Daibliku , and her brother, Malachi, knew Trevor at Westchester Montessori, and Benjamin Franklin Academy, in New York. Malachi was in Trevor's class, and Jadis was a year ahead. In second grade, no one knew that these were Dr. Diabolik's children. That didn't last: Malachi :One short nerd had an apple-red labcoat, with a shaved mullet, if you can believe it, and a cybernetic left eye. Count Fop-ula and Mullethead had robot-things accompanying them, and those were probably loaded with offensive and defensive weaponry. Count Fop-ula’s thing looked like the evil version of a Sceptile or something, while Mister Mullet had a more standard mini-robot, in a matching red color. :“Goodkind? You’re the girl everyone’s talking about who used to be Trevor Goodkind?” It was Mister Mullet, with the cybernetic left eye and the input jacks on the sides of his head. :Okay, conversation was an improvement over all-out battles with mutants. Even conversations on embarrassing topics. “Yeah, that’s me. Except I’m still a guy, just a guy with embarrassing body parts. Ayla Goodkind, formerly known as Trevor Goodkind.” :Mister Mullet broked into a grin. “Don’t you recognize me?” :I looked at the face. It looked really familiar. I mentally blocked out the hair and the input jacks and the cyber-eye and the red-dyed forelocks. I was left with a face that reminded me of a kid. A kid who had been a third-grader the last time I saw him, at the exclusive Franklin Academy in New York. Malachi Daibliku, who had been in my grade. His older sister Jadis had been a year ahead of us. I had really liked her too. :“Mal? Is that you?” :He broke into a wide grin. “Yeah. I never thought I’d see you here. And I really never thought I’d see you looking like one of the campus hotties!” :I groaned, “Don’t remind me. I said I had GSD and it was making me grow boobs and stuff.” :Someone laughed, “A Goodkind knows Dr. Diabolik’s son? That’s funny.” :Dr. Diabolik? Holy crow! But those forelock horns were unmistakable, and the last name… Daibliku? Diabolik. Duh. Really subtle there. How had I not figured this out? :Oh yeah. I was a third grader at the time. :But how had everyone else - all the parents and teachers and school administrators - not figured this out? Or was that why Jadis and Mal had to leave Franklin Academy? :And why wasn’t I panicking about being around a child of the dreaded supervillain Dr. Diabolik? :I asked, “How’s Jadis?” :He shrugged, “Still Jadis. She’s here too. Goes by She-Beast.” :I asked, “So is she a hot exemplar now?” :He grinned wickedly, “Nope. Still looks like always. Still looks like a beanpole and has a face like a hatchet.” :Oh dear. Jadis had always been one of the smart kids, like me. But she was not what you’d call ‘pretty’. I was shocked to realize that I cared. She was a child of an internationally-wanted supervillain, and I was feeling bad for her. I knew it was because I was seeing her as my schoolmate Jadis and not a Supervillain In Training. But still, it was frightening to realize how much my view of the world had changed in just two months. :Mal smirked, “She’ll be glad to hear you’re around. She always liked you. But you weren’t her annoying baby brother, and you were always pulling that ‘oh I read Dickens too’ crap.” :I found myself grinning back at him. I stuck out my hand in a handshake. “In case you hadn’t heard, I go by Phase now.” :He shook my hand. “I’m Techno-Devil around here.” He pointed to Count Fop-ula. “This is my friend Nephandus.” :Count Fop-ula wasn’t interested in shaking hands with me, so I just gave him a nod. But the name ‘Nephandus’ stirred a host of unpleasant associations. Oh. Right. It took me a second to come up with the refs. The RPG “Mage: The Ascension”. Back when I was Trevor, my friend Johnathan had braille translations of all those books so he could play with the D&D nerds. He would talk about that game for hours, if you let him. The Nephandi were evil mages devoted to spreading conflict and corruption wherever they went. That told me more about Nephandus than I wanted to know. :Mal introduced me to most of the other devisers, as the kids behind us streamed on to lunch in the Crystal Hall. I smiled and played nice, but I was really troubled at meeting students who had already marked themselves as future supervillains. Was Mal one of them? He was going by Techno-Devil. His buddy was an obvious ‘future supervillain’. His dad was Dr. Diabolik. But he was my old school pal from third grade. :I couldn’t help thinking of “Smallville”, where Lex and Clark start out as pals. Or of the big finale of “Unbreakable”, where Samuel L. Jackson says, “In a comic, you know how you can tell who the arch-villain’s going to be? He’s the exact opposite of the hero, and most times they’re friends, like you and me.” Just thinking about that sent a chill down my spine. :I walked back to Poe. I no longer felt like eating lunch. I no longer felt like eating, period.Ayla and the New School Jadis :“I’m Ayla Goodkind,” the girl said. :OH, so THAT’S her problem. I’d heard that there was a Goodkind on campus. Wow. And I thought that I had problems. That must be like being a student named ‘Hitler’ at the University of Tel Aviv. I’d also heard a lot of stuff about this Goodkind girl, most of which would have been chucked as too wild by the National Enquirer. I decided to give her a break. “I know some of the Goodkinds, but I don’t place any ‘Ayla’. Are you related to Trevor Goodkind, by any chance?” :“I am Trevor Goodkind,” she said in a flat voice. “Or at least I used to be.” :“What?” I said in a disbelieving tone. Trevor Goodkind used to be a good friend of mine, back when I was going to elementary school, before the NY Times outed Mal and me, and we had to leave the school. And he didn’t look anything LIKE this chick. “I thought that Mal was shitting me!” I looked her up and down. :She quirked me a wry half-smile and said, “The last time that we had lunch together, we were arguing about Wm. Shirer’s dismissal of Goebbel’s skills as a propagandist in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.” :She wasn’t just throwing out a bit of trivia that only Trevor would know; she was pulling that tidbit out of her memory in the way that only an Exemplar - and an Exemplar who’d been trained in the rigorous near-Jesuit standards of the Montessori and Franklin schools - could manage. She was trusting to my own Exemplar memory to recall it and her familiarity with the way that my mind works to put all of that together to substantiate her story. :And if she was an Exemplar… Jeez Louise, she WAS Trevor! I blinked my eyes and struggled for something to say. “I was… expecting someone… blonder…”''Afternoon Tea with the Devil's Daughter'' ++++++++++ :I thought it over for a second, and a simple solution presented itself. “Wait, you all know I’ve babbled on and on more than once about Franklin Academy and Westchester Montessori. Right?” :“Right.” :“Way too often,” supplied a smart-ass in a hammock. :“Thanks Toni, I love you too,” I replied. “Chou? Pull up your laptop, go to the web archives of the New York Times, and search for stories with the keywords ‘Diabolik’ and ‘Benjamin Franklin Academy’. When we were little kids, someone ratted them out and they were all over the newspapers for a week.” :Toni groaned, “You mean a couple little kids got targeted by major paparazzi while they were in elementary school? That sucks. What happened?” :I gritted my teeth, “Their nanny and bodyguard whisked ‘em away, and they never came back. They COULDN’T come back. Jadis said they had to be home-schooled after that, because the FBI and the CIA had men following them 24-7 after that.” :“Jadis? You call her Jadis?” asked Billie, sounding somewhat aghast. :I shrugged, “I always have. When I knew her, she was a kid barely a year older than I was. It wasn’t like she had those forelock horns then. She and Mal were just other kids. I spent most of my lunch periods talking with her about books. That’s all we’re doing now.”''Ayla and the Networks'' ++++++++++ Malachi enjoys telling Trevor stories, such as the Food Boycott: :Mal laughed out loud at that. “He would have if they’d let him. I should tell you about the time he organized a boycott of the food service in the school lunchroom when they refused to serve a better quality milk.” :“Their salad bar was a disgrace, too,” I complained. :Jericho snickered. “Why didn’t you just have the Goodkind chefs whip you up a tasty lunch in a to-go container with ice packs and everything?” :“I did, for the entire length of the boycott. But I wasn’t about to switch to packed lunches and leave everyone else at the mercy of those so-called ‘cooks’. Someone has to look out for those who can’t take care of themselves.” :Jericho pushed, “But weren’t you going to school with a bunch of other rich kids who could also afford anything they wanted?” :Mal smirked, “Trev was all worked up about the consequences of mediocre food on the palates of the other kids.” :I shrugged. There wasn’t much for me to say in rebuttal. It was true. I was only a first grader, so it hadn’t occurred to me that most of the other kids thought the food was fine. I hadn’t figured out back then that normal children had palates with all the refinement of a starving vulture with a head cold. :Jericho grinned, “You really closed down the school cafeteria?” I nodded. “And made them get better food?” I nodded. “As a first grader?” I nodded again. He laughed.Ayla and the Birthday Brawl: Chapter 1 - The Legend of the Red Cross Knight Acquaintances Renshaw Millard Egerton was a class ahead of Trevor at Chilton Academy. Not really friends, more nodding acquaintances, Renshaw dropped off Trevor's radar when he manifested a year prior to Trevor. :I instantly recognized Renshaw Egerton. I knew that last year, Ren had needed to leave Chilton because he had become a mutant, but I hadn’t realized that he would be here too. He looked like he hadn’t changed a bit. With a first name like ‘Ren’, you know that everyone at Chilton had called him ‘Stimpy’. He seemed to be slumped in an armchair looking his usual sullen, unhappy self. Then I saw that he had a bottle of Krystal and a large champagne flute. Not good. Ren was a little less than a year older than I was. He was decidedly under-age. And the bottle was already half-empty. So he really hadn’t changed any with his mutation. Double plus ungood.Ayla and the New School Enemies Tansy Walcutt was also a year ahead of Trevor. Dumpy and lumpy, she'd been tortured by Trevor's older sisters, and took it out on Trev: :I heard something behind me. It sounded like high heels on the brickwork. I didn’t turn around. I had already noticed that I could see a faint image of myself on the glass, so I just stared until I could spot the person coming up from behind. :Oh Jeez! It was that ultra-blonde from the cafeteria Sunday night. The one who looked like she wanted to gut me. I started preparing. I went as heavy as I could, and I prepared for a sneak attack from behind. :She stopped about two yards behind me, and she just stared at the back of my head. Then I felt it. It was like a shove. :It was like a shove inside my head. :It felt like she was pushing me right between the eyes, only about two inches inside my skull. I’d never felt anything like that before. :Oh crap, it was a psi attack. :I didn’t know how to defend myself from a real psi. I only knew what I had been taught by Mother and Uncle Theo. I concentrated really hard on something that occupied my entire mind. I focused on stock reports and tried to mentally analyze the market fluctuations. :I must have blocked whatever-it-was well enough, because the blonde took on an expression of furious frustration. I felt the ‘shove’ lessen and then vanish. :Just about then, I heard a couple nattering girls ambling up the nearby walk. One of them called out, “Tansy? Are you over here?” :Tansy? No way. No fucking way! :The angry blonde behind me whirled around and rushed over to rip into the other girls. I turned and stared. The other girls were two more hot blondes who had that ‘pack’ look. :One of the girls whined loudly enough for me to hear, “But Tansy, you told us to meet you, we’re just doing what you said…” :The other one interrupted, “And anyway, you’ll never guess what happened to Majestic over the summer! Let me tell you…” :I stood there, feeling like the blonde had just hit me over the head with a brick. I walked numbly back toward Poe, although I wasn’t really aware of my surroundings until I reached the cottage. :Was that Tansy Walcutt? Had ugly, tubby, creepy Tansy Walcutt gotten the uber-blonde genes? Had she gotten the mutation that no one like her deserved? Was that really Tansy Walcutt? How did a vicious bitch like her luck out so much, when I was so screwed over? No, life isn’t fair. I already knew that. But, karmically speaking, this was insane. :This was just what I needed. The girl who had done her best to make my life hell since second grade was now one of the beauty queens of my high school, and was out to get me again. Only this time, she had psychic powers or something that she was going to use on me.Ayla and the Blackmailer Family Melissa Thurber-Goodkind was one of Trevor's cousins, and he hadn't really noticed that she'd dropped off his radar. Until he was doing detention in Hawthorne Cottage: :I trudged in. The room made me think of some sort of hospital room. The cheap linoleum tiles covered the floor and went halfway up the walls. The rest of the room was painted a blah white, as if no one cared how the resident felt about it. The center of the room had a huge pump with containers of hideous green stuff, all on a system hooked up to a big winch. Tubes ran from the pump to the backside of the girl in the backless chair. :The girl was intently watching a big monitor screen that was obviously showing some late-afternoon personal-study class. From what the teacher was scrawling on the whiteboard, I was guessing European History. Tubes were hooked up all down her back, down the backs of her arms, and down the backs of her legs. There were even a couple metal tubes that hooked into the base of her skull. It was like looking at a scene from “The Matrix”. Only she was green. Well, if she had green blood pumping through her, that was hardly surprising. And she rocked forward slightly with each downstroke of the pump. Frankly, it was nauseating just watching her. I couldn’t imagine the horror of being her. :She didn’t turn from the screen. She just growled, “Get the hell out of here! I’m busy!” :I muttered, “Detention. Mrs. Cantrel sent me in to clean up.” :“Well, just don’t make any noise, okay?” she snarled. :I got to work. There was already a bucket and mop against one wall, and the bucket was full of a nasty-looking yellow cleaning agent. :As I mopped the floor and the wall tiles, I listened to the teacher. “Then the armies of Henry the Fifth and Charles the Sixth met at Agincourt. Who knows when?” :“October 25th, 1415,” I whispered. :She turned her head and glared at me. She wouldn’t have been a bad-looking girl if she wasn’t green. With fifty tubes plugged into her. Her soft brown hair was scraggly, as if she couldn’t be bothered to do anything with it for weeks at a time. Her patrician face reminded me of plenty of relatives and girls with whom I’d gone to private schools. :“Yes. October 25, 1415. That’s correct,” said the teacher. “But the army of Charles the Sixth was not helmed by Charles, because he was incapacitated. Does anyone know who was leading the French armies?” :I whispered, “The constable Charles d’Albret.” :Puppet glanced hastily at me and pressed a button on her desk. “The constable Charles d’Albret.” :“Yes! Very good, was that you, Puppet?” :“Yes sir.” :“Well done.” He went on, “d’Albret was merely Charles’ constable, so there were many important noblemen of the Armagnac party who were also running things. Now then…” I took the bucket of toxic waste out, and I poured it down the bio-hazard chute. :By the time I got back in, the class was ending and Puppet was turning off the monitor. She slowly turned and asked me, “How the hell did you know all that?” :I took off my gas mask and told her, “European History camp, in Paris.” :She snorted, “You sound like some of my cousins. Who are you anyway?” :“Phase,” I replied. “Most of the campus already knows I’m…” :She suddenly stared at me in horror. “You’re a Goodkind? You’re the Goodkind kid who just manifested?” :This wasn’t going well. I reluctantly agreed, “Yeah…” :“Which one? Uncle Herb doesn’t have any kids…” :Uncle Herb? She was a cousin of mine? I stared at her harder. Oh my God, I was pretty sure I recognized her. Melissa Thurber-Goodkind. :I cautiously asked, “Missy?” She reacted like I’d smacked her in the face with a dead halibut. “It’s me. Trevor. I go by Ayla now, because my body…” :“GET OUT! GET OUT NOW! GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!! I DON’T WANT YOU IN HERE!”''Ayla and the Tests: Chapter 3 - The Ceryneian Hind'' Things did improve with Melissa. :Even Puppet asked me to come back and visit. She pouted, “I hardly ever get visitors, unless you count technicians and doctors…” References Category:Students Category:Gen1 Category:People